ERIK LAURENCE^^Founder of Polarian Partners

Erik Laurence is a veteran of the technology and financial industries. founded Polarian Partners, an investment firm focused on commercial real estate, healthcare and technology. Erik is a board member of several companies, including Global Research Institute, a healthcare company for which he led a successful turnaround. Prior to Polarian, Erik served as Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at FeeX, a venture-backed fund analysis company that helps investors optimize their retirement portfolios, where he sourced and closed deals to monetize FeeX service and drive traffic by bringing in industry partners including Blackrock, Fidelity, Vanguard, E*Trade. Before that, he was based in Shanghai for 4 years and served as Head of Greater China for NASDAQ-listed Verint, a $2.5-billion market cap technology firm, where he developed and executed growth strategies for its China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan offices and grew business by 33% in 3 years for the region. Before moving to China, Erik was Vice President of Global Product Marketing for Verint based at its New York headquarters. Prior to that, Erik was part of the executive leadership team at CosmoCom, a telecom startup that raised $65 million in venture funding, a record in that area at the time. Earlier in his career, he served in various sales and marketing capacities to help Comverse (now Mavenir) grow from a fledgling startup to become a multi-billion-dollar global leader in enhanced telecom services. Along the way, Erik has advised a number of early stage startups, including the highly successful navigation and traffic app Waze, which he consulted for when it was in its pre-money stage. Erik has a BS in Electrical Engineering with honors from Tufts University and an MBA from Columbia Business School, where he was the Valedictorian of his class.